The Conquering Tide (93 page)

At regular monthly meetings with the army, the editors bravely declared that
Chuo Koran
's mission was to persuade intellectuals to support the war. Their readers, they argued, were too sophisticated to be moved by unbridled jingoism and mechanical sloganeering. They needed reason and persuasion. But that line of argument found no purchase with the authorities. “At one meeting,” Hatanaka recalled, “we at
Chuo Koran
were practically told to slit our bellies open.”

They said our way of thinking was wrong. “Everyone must put their minds to war,” was their slogan. To them, that meant run up the flag, sing military songs, and cheer loudly! Even a nihilistic attitude toward war was wrong. They said they could tell if we were sincere just by looking at the color in our faces.
¹⁴

If Hatanaka had hoped for support among his fellow editors, he hoped in vain. His colleagues watched in stony disapproval as
Chuo Koran
was chastised. He imagined that they were thinking, “It serves them right!”
¹⁵
If the authorities wanted to knock a competitor out of print, so much the better. In any case, an editor who defended a rival might find his own publication singled out for added scrutiny. In March 1943, when all Japanese magazines were ordered to print the slogan “We'll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be,”
Chuo Koran
printed it inside the magazine, following the editorial, rather than on the cover as specified. This small act of defiance sealed its fate. A shutdown order followed within days. Hatanaka was branded a communist and hauled off to prison, where he was beaten and tortured almost daily for nine months.

In November 1943, all new newspaper subscriptions were banned. Thereafter, only existing subscribers would receive deliveries. Smaller newspapers were merged into larger ones. The giants
Asahi
and
Yomiuri
, both militantly nationalistic, swallowed up many of their smaller competitors. By 1944, many more once-flourishing magazines and newspapers had suspended
publication and shuttered their doors. With a handful of compliant titans dominating the news-gathering and -reporting business, official censorship was greatly simplified. Readers furtively complained that indistinguishable government-sanctioned piffle ran in every paper on the newsstand.

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
J
UNE 20, 1944
, as the defeated First Mobile Fleet retired north toward Japan, the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters had struggled to form a clear picture of Ozawa's situation. Communications were fragmentary and confusing, but what little information got through was distressing. Two fleet carriers were definitely gone, and only a handful of planes had returned from the strikes of June 19. But there remained some hope that the enemy's fleet had been bloodied in the previous day's action, and that a proportion of Ozawa's planes had flown on to Guam. An intercepted American radio transmission mentioned “survivors” of the
Bunker Hill
, raising hopes that the carrier had been sunk—but subsequent intercepts referred to downed aviators, not to the ship's crew.
¹⁶
When the American carrier planes attacked Ozawa on the evening of June 20, sinking a third Japanese carrier (the
Hiyo
), the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters could read the writing on the wall. If Spruance had chased Ozawa halfway across the Philippine Sea, his fleet must be intact. The scale of the naval defeat thus presented itself in unambiguous terms. On the same evening, messages from General Saito's headquarters on Saipan indicated that the Americans had secured the southern half of the island. Without naval or air support, Saito's position was tactically hopeless; it was only a matter of time before Saipan would fall to the Americans.

Senior military officers privately admitted, “We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success.”
¹⁷
In Europe, the Allies were driving east from their Normandy beachhead while the Russians were advancing west into Poland. Hirohito's military advisers privately told the emperor that the loss of Saipan was inevitable. But the emperor was in no mood to accept that verdict, and he pushed his chiefs to renew the fight by any means possible. “If we ever lose Saipan, repeated air attacks on Tokyo will follow,” Hirohito told Tojo. “No matter what it takes, we have to hold there.”
¹⁸
In a late-afternoon meeting at the Imperial Palace on June 20, he directed Tojo and Shimada to muster all available naval and air forces for another desperate attack on the American fleet, to be followed by troop landings on the contested island.

Knowing full well that the sovereign's proposal was tactically daft, the Naval General Staff worked through the night and circulated a draft plan on June 21. The Fifth Fleet, under Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, would be summoned from Ominato Naval Base in northern Honshu. Admiral Shima would rendezvous with two fleet oilers and a troopship carrying one regiment, then sortie from Yokosuka for the Marianas on July 2. Another army division would embark on transports totaling 80,000 tons and put to sea in the first week of July. The surviving elements of Ozawa's fleet would be reinforced with the escort carriers
Kaiyo
,
Taiyo
, and
Shinyo
. Having lost nearly all of his aircraft in the recent battle, Ozawa would embark new air groups consisting of naval air-training squadrons and army fighters. Admiral Kurita's Second Fleet, having previously been ordered to sail for the Singapore area, would refuel and rearm in the western part of the Inland Sea and then return directly to the Marianas. All available land-based aircraft would stage through Iwo Jima and renew the air battle against the American carrier force. The American fleet would be destroyed in time for the troop reinforcements to put ashore on Saipan.

Conceived at the man-god's command and in the depths of despair, the plan to recapture Saipan was preposterous on its face. It was not even clear that enough fuel could be provided to put the various fleet elements into position to renew the battle. The American submarines would likely claim many more victims. American seaplanes would discover the incoming forces early. The army leadership was implacably opposed to putting their fighter squadrons aboard aircraft carriers, and it was not clear that the army airmen could even take off from the flight decks. The troopships would need a stroke of good fortune to get anywhere close to Saipan, and even if the troops could be landed, they would likely be wiped out on the beaches. But the
Showa
emperor had lost faith in his military leaders and did not want to hear their objections. For three days the services scrambled to launch an operation they knew to be suicidal. On June 24, Admiral Toyoda of the Combined Fleet weighed in with his formal opposition. That same day, Tojo and Shimada informed the emperor that there was no hope of recovering the island, and that they had cancelled the operation on their own authority. Even then, Hirohito refused to accept that judgment as final, and he convened a larger board of military advisers on June 25. When they confirmed that Saipan was a lost cause, Hirohito told them to put their conclusions in writing and left the room.

As usual, the Japanese people could only guess at the full truth. For several weeks in June and July, news reporting on the battle for Saipan was perplexing and contradictory. The Board of Information was evidently undecided. When and how should the public be informed that the island was to be yielded to the enemy? The July 1 issue of
Toyo Keizai
ventured to declare, “It can be acknowledged that this one island has such value that we will expend all our power to protect it.”
¹⁹
Prior to the invasion, that opinion had been unimpeachable, but now it elicited an “advisory warning” from the police. Lacking clear guidance from the government, the newspapers generally resorted to hollow sloganeering in stories headlined “The Fighting Will of 100 Million Seethes” or “The Establishment of an Impenetrable Defense Cordon and Total Tenacity.”
^*
20

Even without reliable news reports, ordinary Japanese could deduce that the loss of Saipan would open a desperate new phase of the war. Maps were unrolled and studied. Saipan was not far south. It had been Japanese territory for more than twenty years. It was home to a large population of Japanese civilians. If the Americans could land an invasion force on Saipan, within bombing range of the homeland, then the regime's past claims of fantastic and annihilating victories must have been fabrications. Aiko Takahashi told her diary on July 18, 1944, that Japan had obviously suffered another crushing defeat, but “reports in newspapers and magazines boast that giving up these islands is a tactic for drawing in the enemy and the enemy is doing what we want.”
²¹
She did not believe it, nor did many other ordinary Japanese. But it was not safe to air such opinions within earshot of others. Sachi Ariyama, a boy in Kawagoe, recalled that his father was arrested after expressing a casual opinion that the fall of Saipan meant “things were serious.” After many hours of interrogation he was released, but the entire family remained under surveillance until the end of the war.
²²

Disaster in the Marianas inevitably loosened Tojo's grip on power. In February the general had fortified his control of the cabinet by adding the job of army chief of staff to his concurrent offices of prime minister and army minister, and by arranging for the malleable Admiral Shimada to serve simultaneously as navy minister and navy chief of staff. Controlling
such an all-encompassing portfolio of political and military offices, Tojo could scarcely duck responsibility for the Saipan debacle. In late June he issued a public statement referring to his “great shame” before the emperor. He had never used such language in the past.

Since the fall of Guadalcanal in early 1943, an anti-Tojo coalition had been maneuvering behind the scenes to oust the general from power. The group included several former prime ministers, military leaders, diplomats, elected members of the Diet (parliament), and various members of the imperial family. The prime mover was Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who had twice served as prime minister in the prewar years and whom Tojo had pushed out of office six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Konoye worked with a navy group around Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, another former prime minister who had been Yamamoto's chief ally in opposition to the Tripartite Pact. Konoye and Yonai built support among a working group of former prime ministers called the
jushin
(senior statesmen). Konoye expressed his views to Marquis Koichi Kido, lord keeper of the privy seal and chief adviser on the emperor's personal staff.

Tojo did not go willingly. For several weeks in late June and early July 1944, the opposing factions grappled for ascendancy. According to rumors, Tojo wanted to have his adversaries arrested by the
Kempeitai
, but he could not turn up sufficient grounds to bring charges against figures as influential as Konoye and Yonai. He proposed another cabinet reshuffling in which he would retain at least one of his accumulated jobs, perhaps that of army minister. The Combined Fleet chief, Admiral Toyoda, threatened to resign if Shimada was permitted to remain simultaneously as the head of the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff. The
jushin
collectively declined to accept any offices in a cabinet that retained Tojo.

Konoye feared that the war and its disruptions would prompt a socialist upheaval, as in Russia during the Great War. His greatest concern was the survival of the
kokutai
. In the 1930s, the army's
kodo
(imperial way) faction had often advocated collectivist values in the guise of right-wing ideology—for example, by urging a “restoration” of all industry and private property to the throne, or threatening to rectify economic inequality by direct force of arms. Konoye reportedly went so far as to tell his fellow
jushin
that he feared revolution more than defeat: “Even if defeated, we could maintain the national structure and the imperial family, but in case of a leftist revolution, we could not.”
²³
The mayhem prompted by aerial bombing and foreign
invasion might bring another breakdown in army discipline, a return of factionalism and assassinations, and a complete disintegration of Japan's fragile political order.

The
jushin
were determined to be rid of Tojo, and Kido was persuaded to throw his considerable influence behind the cause. But who would take Tojo's place? Existing power-sharing arrangements could not be easily unscrambled. For all his manifest flaws, Tojo had managed to unify the army. He had brought the
kodo
faction to heel, and neutralized many of its leading figures by sending them to forward posts. During his premiership, the rebellious young officers had not broken out in open defiance, as they so often had in the past. The struggle for primacy and influence between the army and the navy remained as bitter as ever, but Tojo had kept the rivalry from boiling over into open conflict. For two and a half years, he had maintained a brittle consensus within the ruling circle. It was not clear that a successor could prolong the intricate balancing act.

Konoye urged Yonai to serve again as prime minister, but the admiral declined, insisting that the army would only accept one of its own. On the same grounds, the
jushin
agreed that no civilian should be proposed for the post. A general was needed. Several names were considered and rejected. The man selected by default was Kuniaki Koiso, a retired general who had served throughout the war years as governor of Korea. He was to be little more than a figurehead, chosen only to mollify the army. Yonai would serve as vice premier as well as navy minister, and the new cabinet would be presented to the nation as a unity government with power to be shared by the army and navy.

Tojo's position became untenable on July 15, when Shimada was ousted from his dual posts. Tojo's last hope of a reconstituted cabinet was defeated on July 17, when the
jushin
signed a joint memorandum stating that “a partial shuffling of the cabinet will not do.”
²⁴
He resigned on July 18. In a nationwide radio address that evening, Tojo told his countrymen that “Japan has come to face an unprecedented great national crisis. Our enemies, the United States and Britain, have gradually increased the intensity of their counter-offensive and have at last advanced into the Marianas.” In the same breath he prophesied the elusive triumph that would save Japan: “The situation now approaches when opportunity will occur to crack the enemy and to win victory.”
²⁵